Jazz Fest Concert at Hopewell to mark 80th birthday of CCC

By Mercury Staff

Thursday, April 11, 2013

The National Park Service will commemorate the 80th birthday of the Civilian Conservation Corps with a Jazz Concert performed by the Exeter Community Band at 2 p.m. on Sunday, April 14, at Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site. The event is free and open to the public. This concert is part of the nationally renowned Berks Jazz Fest.

The Exeter Community Band is an all-volunteer local concert band that has performed at retail and banking establishments, senior citizen community settings, church picnics, Douglassville Community Days and the Oley Fair. The Hopewell program will feature the music of the 1930s and 1940s. Songs such as “Star Dust,” “Blue Moon,” and “But Not For Me” will be played by the band. These are tunes that might have been heard on the radio by the some 400 members of the Civilian Conservation Corps companies that built French Creek State Park and restored Hopewell Furnace. The concert will also feature jazz songs composed by Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and more.

Created in March of 1933, during the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, known as FDR’s tree army, put thousands of unemployed men to work. Under the direction of the National Park Service, the CCC camps at the federal French Creek National Recreation Demonstration Area accomplished the first preservation and protection work at what is now Hopewell Furnace.

The park is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday including Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day and Veterans Day. On Mondays and Tuesdays, while the visitor center and historic buildings are closed, the grounds and restrooms remain open. Hopewell Furnace is located five miles south of Birdsboro off Route 345.